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Venezuela's Election System Holds Up As A Model For The World

This article is by Eugenio Martinez, who covers elections for Venezuela’s newspaper El Universal and is the host of the weekly TV show El Termómetro.

Nicolas Maduro (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Two weeks ago Venezuelans went to the polls to elect a president to transition their country into the post-Chavez era. Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s hand-chosen successor, and his opponent, Henrique Capriles, had spent 34 days hurling criticisms and promises back and forth as they attempted to woo voters and guide Venezuela’s future.

Maduro, representing the Chavista movement, was expected to win easily, and few anticipated taht his margin of victory would be an ultra-narrow 1.83%. Judging by his defiant speeches after the election, Maduro seems to believe he inherited the throne and the legitimacy of a wide-margin victory.

However, the slim margin propelled Capriles on a quest for lost votes, a crusade to prove electoral irregularities and cast doubt on the outcome. This campaign has exposed deep political rifts among our citizens when it is essential that the people of Venezuela have the greatest confidence in the election process.

Venezuela employs one of the most technologically advanced verifiable voting systems in the world, designed to protect voters from fraud and tampering and ensure the accuracy of the vote count. Accuracy and integrity are guaranteed from the minute voters walk into the polls to the point where a final tally is revealed.

The system Venezuela uses has some of the most advanced and voter-friendly security features in modern elections. Voters use a touch-sensitive electronic pad to make and confirm their choices. After confirmation, the electronic vote is encrypted and randomly stored in the machine’s memories. Voters audit their own vote by reviewing a printed receipt that they then place into a physical ballot box.

At the end of Election Day, each voting machine computes and prints an official tally, called a precinct count. It transmits an electronic copy of the precinct count to the servers in the National Electoral Council’s central facility, where overall totals are computed.

By mutual agreement between the contenders, 52.98% of the ballot boxes are chosen at random, opened, and their tallies compared with the corresponding precinct counts. This audit step ensures that no vote manipulation has occurred at the polling place. The extent of this audit, the widest in automatic elections, leaves little room for questioning.

The series of tests before, during, and after a Venezuelan election is thorough and intense, conducted in the presence of election officials and political parties to ensure proper functionality and full confidence in the system. When it comes to elections, Venezuela has become a highly advanced nation of auditors, with the most advanced audit tools at its disposal and a voting process that is as transparent as any in the world.

Even though the election to succeed Chavez was announced with only 34 days to campaign and organize the election mechanics, the National Electoral Council and Smartmatic, the company that developed the highly-sophisticated voting machines and the technology supporting them, managed to perform more than 12 audits on the voting platform, many in front of both Capriles’ and Maduro’s representatives.

Like any candidate who suffers a narrow defeat at the polls, Mr. Capriles is entitled to keep his dream alive. He can continue trying to prove that somehow the outcome was affected by a corrupt electoral ecosystem. His people are betting that scrutinizing the manual electoral book and the government-controlled electoral roll will reveal a clue to how their triumph slipped away. In a nation of auditors and entirely transparent election mechanics, that quest is certainly their right, but their chance of changing the election’s outcome may be very slim.

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hopefully this will all work out. maduras obviously had the full control of media during the election process. Was he really suppose to be president and control the media? What if it the media was able to be objective during the whole election process – now there’s democracy at its finest. I just have a hard time rationalizing how a bus driver was picked to run a country. when someone is elected because of their abilities and a history of supporting the freedom of speech and equal rights the democratic world will support and respect them.

Hey Ron, Believe or not, Lech Walesa (Nobel Peace Prize, Union leader and President of Poland between 1990 and 1995, just not to be extended in mentions) worked for several years as a line electrician and a car mechanic. Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (Two times president of Brazil) worked as a lathe operator in a copper processing factory. Besides, Richard Milhous Nixon, a Duke University School of Law attended and graduated third in his class, was a… well, we already know Watergate’s implies… One of the main features to be a Nation’s leader, is to have a social sensibility. And you said so “when someone is elected because of their abilities and a history of supporting the freedom of speech and equal rights the democratic world will support and respect them”. We should not evaluated the abilitie of a man just because he was a bus driver…

hahaha! so you are calling all the electoral witnesses liers? so you are calling all the people who audit that night liers? you just talk and talk…. bring evidence, not stupid facebook photo montage spam. YES the voting system IS protected against voting violations before and after the vote selection is executed.

How do you explain the public harassment of voters in the entrance of electoral centres by government supporters? SO YOU ARE TELLING ME THAT IN VENEZUELA LIVES VERY VERY STUPID PEOPLE WHO KNOWING THAT THEIR VOTE IS SECRET ARE GOING TO CHANGE THEIR VOTE INTENTION . This government supporters should be penalized but tell me landaeta, how many centres where in this situation? how many electoral centres are in total? tell me how many voting tables are in total?

Okay, I just have to add my voice to say that this article really bothers me for several reasons:

1. NO technology is tamper proof. Just because a machine both prints a vote on a little piece of paper does not mean that it can’t be rigged to print out the wrong vote or print out extra votes for a particular candidate. All the hacker has to do is make sure the incorrect vote count on print is consistent with the digital recordings and hide the incorrect reporting from the voter. Difficult? Yes. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? No.

2. How can anyone be so certain that the 52.98% of the machines that are checked twice for verification are indeed chosen at random? The contenders certainly agreed to this percentage, but neither we involved with the process of choosing the machines to be tested. If they were rigged by someone in government, the rigged machines could have easily been avoided in a seemingly random testing.

3. To my knowledge, Caprilles never claimed that the voting machines were rigged and, if he did, it was lumped together as only a part of the thousands of voting violations he was claiming. Assuming there was no mechanical rigging of the voting machines, there are still hundreds of other ways to skew a vote. On the day of the elections, there were reports of polling locations being shut down in places where people were more likely to vote for Caprilles, roads being closed off, people being physically (and violently) removed from polling locations if they were intending to vote for Caprilles, and more. You don’t need to rig technology to skew an election.

I admit, there has been a lot of false information being presented from Caprilles’s supporters as well, especially photos and videos intended to depict heinous crimes by the government, which could have easily been fabricated or captured at a different time.

Nevertheless, no system is fool proof and it truly scares me that a U.S. based news source could claim an election system as a “model for the world” in a evidently socialist country with such flagrant signs of corruption, such that the candidates of the opposition are only allowed minute amounts of public TV air time and are not permitted to peacefully protest when they believe a vote was unfair.

peacefully protest? i was in one of the peacefully protest in Valencia, they blocked a highway and some of this peacefull people tryed to force people that where in their cars to get out. Some of this peaceull people had molotovs and rocks waiting for the authority… keep watching hollywood movies.

This article oversimplifies the issue and omits the real reason why the opposition is calling for new elections. To put it simply, there were irregularities affecting over 2.2 million votes, including thousands of duplicate votes, dead people voting, forced voting, cajoling opposition witnesses and over 12000 complaints. The government agreed to the rules of a recount but quicky went back on its word. The election commitee was so partisan towards de government that,not only they registered in the PSUV, the rulng party, but they made dscourses in their favor. As my old database professor used to say , “garbage in , garbage out”

You can write whatever you want, that is what you are paid for, but non of your misrepresenting articles will not reduce the ILLEGITIMACY of NICOLAS MADURO, the illegitimate president of Venezuela. The candidate who won the presidential elections on April the 14th is called HENRIQUE CAPRILES RADONSKY, and we are some 8.000.000 voters who believe this is so. We do not solely blame the electronic fraud, there were hundred of other factors that together are being used to CONFIRM the illegitimacy of Nicolas. https://www.facebook.com/DEFENDAMOSELVOTO

As is the case with any elections process, it is insufficient to scrutinize just the balloting process. It is important to consider the campaigns themselves, and in the case of the most recent Venezuelan campaign, even a modest examination of the process would uncover not only irregularities, but also many instances when the government violated its own campaign laws. It’s too bad to see so much coverage of the elections that is limited to the actual day of elections. As we all know, democracy is about more than elections–it’s about campaigns, political parties, and governance. I think it would be a relatively easy case to make that the Chavez and now Maduro governments do not pass those tests with flying colors.